Natural Flights of the Human Mind (9 page)

Why are they all so obsessed with Straker? It’s as if they want him to have killed someone. ‘What’s the matter with him?’

‘He never sleeps. Ever.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘His light’s always on, up there in the dark, shining out non-stop.’

‘That’s what lighthouses do.’

Sharon smiles, but there is something nervous about the smile. ‘Oh, no, it’s not a working lighthouse. There’s something very odd about him. Never speaks to anyone.’

Doody wants to tell her that he’s spoken to her, but finds herself unwilling to admit that she’s met him. ‘What does he do all day?’

‘That’s another thing. He doesn’t go out and do a day’s work like anyone else. He just wanders around—up and down the beach, as if he’s looking for something.’

‘How strange,’ says Doody, encouragingly.

But Sharon has said enough. ‘Yes, strange, strange.’ She smiles again, this time more openly. ‘See you again, I hope,’ she says.

Maybe. She probably wants Doody to smile back and give her name, so Doody says nothing.

As she comes out of the shop, holding a crutch and the carrier-bag in one hand, leaning on the other crutch, a car drives past unnecessarily fast. She watches as it goes round the corner, and steps out into the road, immediately colliding with a woman who is looking the other way.

‘Sorry,’ she says, and it’s Mrs Whittaker who had given directions to the lighthouse.

‘Hello,’ she says, peering at Doody. ‘Did you find Mr Straker?’

‘Yes, thank you.’ She doesn’t want to tell her the details.

Mrs Whittaker looks over the top of her glasses. ‘So, did he talk to you?’

‘Of course,’ says Doody.

Mrs Whittaker frowns. ‘He’s very odd, you know.’

‘Yes, I think I’d worked that out for myself.’

‘The police are keeping an eye on him.’

‘Because he’s killed someone?’

‘There are other things…’

Doody feels increasingly frustrated by them all, their mysterious suggestions and suspicions. It makes her want to defend Straker. ‘Like what?’

But Mrs Whittaker has registered Doody’s irritation, and her expression changes. ‘Oh, nothing. I’m sure you’ll find out soon enough.’ She turns and continues on her way.

Doody walks up the road to her cottage and thinks of Straker speaking to her. Mrs Whittaker and the post-mistress were wrong and she was right. That doesn’t happen to her very often.

She unlocks the front door and steps in. The first thing she notices, which she doesn’t remember from last time, is the smell. Damp, musty, unlived-in, old. She goes into the lounge with the intention of opening a window, but this turns out to be impossible. The windows are divided into small panes, and someone has painted them with too much enthusiasm, in the mistaken belief that rot will stop if it’s painted. The paint has overlapped on to the glass and dripped down. It’s coated the catches and welded them into a solid, impenetrable mass.

Doody is disappointed by Fred’s information, and resents the intrusion of Bob and Carol Macklethorpe into Oliver d’Arby’s dust, their presence in his silent spaces. Did the clothes in the wardrobe belong to Oliver or Bob?

She takes longer to examine everything this time, looking beyond the dust and cobwebs, discovering that things are not
as they seem. Beneath a neglected but neat exterior, everything is dying, breaking down, corrupting.

The stair-carpet threads its way up the centre, leaving the edges bare and untouched. The pattern that remains beneath the layers of neglect is muddled and vague, a blurred geometric combination of grey and brown.

The stairs seem secure, but a cloud of dust puffs up with every step she takes. She grips the banister rail, convinced that her foot will go right through each step. Nothing is permanent. It all dissolves with time, crumbles into nothing, settles back into non-existence. It’s difficult to find a place for herself in this dying, abandoned house.

Upstairs, it’s darker than she remembered. The windows are too small to pull in much of the evening light. She should have brought a candle up with her, but she’s unwilling to light one before it’s necessary. Candles are all right as a last resort, but once you have a light, the outside turns into a frightening darkness.

There are two rooms and a bathroom up here. The larger room was presumably used as a bedroom by the Macklethorpes. The double bed that Doody had thought was Oliver d’Arby’s must have been theirs. It looks completely normal—a high, dark wooden bed, covered with a grey-blue candlewick bedspread. Doody didn’t touch it on her first visit because it seemed so normal and peaceful. In a state of readiness, expecting Oliver d’Arby to return at any moment to catch up on all those missing years of sleep. This time, she’s looking for blankets, so she decides to pull back the bedspread. But when she touches it, a thick layer comes away in her hand. She steps back in alarm as it disintegrates and flies away into nothing. It takes her a while to realise that the bedspread is not made of candlewick, not grey-blue, but a smoother, paler blue. The surface consists of delicately interwoven dust that separates into vague strands when it’s disturbed. Once she’s worked this out, she holds the end of the bedspread and pulls
it up and off as quickly as possible. Then she stands back to wait for the clouds of dust to settle. There are two blankets folded underneath, one pink with satin edges and the other green and blue tartan. She picks up the tartan one and sniffs it. There’s a smell of oldness and dust, but nothing else. It might be all right if she bangs it up and down outside for a bit. She tucks it under her arm and examines the rest of the room.

There’s a wardrobe against one wall, huge and dark, overwhelming in a small room. She opens the door, and is surprised to discover that it’s almost empty, unlike many of the other cupboards in the house. In one corner is a pair of ladies’ shoes, brown leather with small heels, and a strap that’s fastened with a button. In another corner there are two wheels on top of each other—not quite large enough for bicycle wheels. The tyres are flat, the rubber loose and flabby. There’s a small box against the back wall, which she pulls out. Knitting patterns. Cable jumpers, Aran cardigans, polo-necks. Men and women smiling out cleanly, frozen into the time of their origin by their hairstyles and their wholesomeness. The ceiling has collapsed above the wardrobe, and the wood on one side is swollen and discoloured where rain has poured in through the imperfect roof.

When she goes into the other room, smaller than the first, she finds what she found before. Here’s the bureau, and the drawers with no underwear, and a small wardrobe with two empty suits, hanging dejectedly, redundant without a body to occupy them. These belonged to Oliver d’Arby. He must have put all his belongings into this room when he decided to leave. This was the room that he said goodbye to when he left with his cello to go to wherever he mysteriously went.

There’s a larger hole in the ceiling here, and when Doody stands by the pile of debris and looks up, she can see pale gaps in the roof where tiles have gone, and where the plastic is now fixed. What was he thinking when he left? Did he expect to come back some time?

She walks over to the bureau and opens it, keen to examine the evidence of Oliver d’Arby’s life. The front drops down easily to make a neat but strong desk. It smells very strongly of ink. Every compartment, every drawer, is stuffed with letters, bills, thrown in at random, with no apparent attempt at organisation. She picks out some to examine, but it’s too dark to read. She feels a moment of excitement that she’s standing by a desk that has not been touched for twenty-five years. A desk that belonged to Oliver d’Arby, the man who went out one day and never came back.

She takes a pile of papers to examine later. She wants to know about Oliver. If she can understand why he disappeared, perhaps she can get closer to the thoughts of Harry, who also never came home.

Downstairs, she takes the blanket outside, with two large cushions from the sofa, and bangs them against a wall of the cottage until the release of dust becomes less significant. Then she makes herself a bed on the floor of the sitting room. She lights two candles and sets them on either side. She lights another and takes it into the kitchen to look for a plate and a knife. There’s a pile of blue and white china in a cupboard, still shiny, protected from the real world. There’s cutlery in a drawer, yellow and tarnished, purchased before the invention of stainless steel.

She tries the taps, but nothing comes out, so she wipes the knife and plate with a tissue and sits at the kitchen table to eat her makeshift meal. She doesn’t exactly enjoy it, sitting there in semi-darkness, the first human occupant for five years. She’s not sure how safe she feels in this dying house.

When she lies down on the cushions, she hears whispers and rustling and scrabbling. Is it mice, or birds trapped in the attic? Do the sighs come from the trees outside, or the polythene inexpertly applied by Straker? She’s nervous about insects, animals, mould, rot, but she’s too tired to give any of it much attention. Her face glows hot and uncomfortable and she
realises that she must have been in the sun too long. She falls asleep listening for noises, thinking about Mandles limping out of the cove where he crashed, looking for help.

She has a title now: Mandles and the Lighthouse.

Why would anyone live in a lighthouse? It must be so awkward doing the shopping. Does he have electricity, a phone? What about a loo?

Straker appears on the edge of her dreams and she tries to hear what he is saying. She finds she is unable to reproduce the sound of his voice in her mind.

Patterns. Rhythms. Sequences. They are all around Straker and part of him. Even on bad days, there’s a rhythm in the sea, the cloud formations, the shadows of the clouds on the water. Lying awake in the dark, he can hear the waves thudding against the cliff below, pushing further in, attacking the foundations of the lighthouse. They hammer and grind and pound away, and if he stays still and stops resisting, he becomes part of that movement, able to disappear into the patterns and cease to be. When the storms come, everything tries harder, gets angrier. The cliff retreats, and its substance is deposited elsewhere. The patterns shift with the fluctuations of the land, but they make new shapes and routines. As one shrinks, another grows.

Not everyone understands the patterns. The young people in their sailing dinghies know they’re dependent on the tide, but they fight it, do things quickly, race against the inevitable. They can’t win, but they don’t seem to accept this at all.

Magnificent roams the area freely, believing himself to be unique, but he’s as much a part of the natural processes as the sea. He leaves shifting traces of himself everywhere, baby Magnificents carrying his pattern inside themselves, the DNA.

It terrifies Straker that he carries his father’s genes. Or that his father carried his. There’s no escape. It’s written inside him, indelibly. He will become more like his father as he grows older. And, since Straker is a murderer, his father must have possessed at least some of the genes of a murderer and passed them on, freely and inevitably. So why didn’t he share the guilt?

When Miss Doody left on the bus, Straker cycled back to the lighthouse. He stood on the edge of the cliff, watching the sea and the seagulls, but there was something new about the way he saw it. Normally, if he turned his back for a while, then turned round again, it would still be the same, the buffeting wind, the taste of salt on his lips. Now he could feel changes that didn’t fit into the existing patterns. A tremor of rebellion passed through the cliff-top and into his legs.

He was bothered by Miss Doody, by the fact that she had walked here, a mile over uneven surfaces on crutches, just to shout at him. What was it for, what did she want from him?

Darkness crept up on him while he was walking backwards and forwards in front of the lighthouse and a chill settled bleakly somewhere inside him. His mind had been drifting; there were no numbers clicking over inside him. With something like panic, he went inside and ran up and down the first flight of stairs. Ten times. Thirty-seven stairs, ten times up, ten times down. Seven hundred and forty stairs. He stopped at seventy-five, counted to ten, then resumed at eighty-six.

When he’d finished, he went upstairs. Crunching an apple, he sat at his desk, intending to read some letters and go over his latest notes on Sangita. But he was too easily distracted by the wind buffeting against the window, a sound that always reminded him of childhood holidays.

Every year, they went to the same hotel in north Devon, where the sea rolls in along great open beaches. Surfing waves, useless for swimming, big and frightening. It was unclear why they went to Woolacombe, because his father couldn’t swim and refused to go into the sea. His parents would settle down on deckchairs in the dunes, sheltered from the wind, while Pete and Andy went off to the sea.

‘Careful, don’t splash!’ their mother would shout when
they jumped in among them, shivering from the cold, in urgent need of towels, teeth chattering, lips blue. They would crouch down under their towels, eating the egg sandwiches the hotel had made up for them, tasting the salt, crunching the sand.

Their father wouldn’t eat on the beach. When their mother put down her knitting and offered him a sandwich, he waved it away. ‘We’ll eat later in the restaurant,’ he said. ‘No need for that now.’ Everything about his wife irritated him, whether they were at home or on holiday.

‘Just a small one?’ said their mother.

‘Leave it alone, will you?’ he said, and went back to his book. He read Agatha Christie. In all the black-and-white holiday photographs there was a Penguin paperback in his hand, the green and white edition—
The ABC Murders, Ten Little Indians, Miss Marple
. He never read anything else.

Their mother liked to bring a flask of tea with a small bottle of milk, and sugar in an empty honey jar with a screw top. Their father would accept his cup of tea, in a china cup and saucer, without pleasure or gratitude, drinking it all, despite his resentment.

‘Collect shells,’ said Andy to Pete, on their way down to the sea. ‘Just the round white ones.’

Pete did as he was told, not minding too much, eager to please. He worried over every shell, never certain which ones were right, occasionally attempting to check with his brother. ‘Will these ones do?’

Andy was not interested in hanging around with his brother. He would drift up to groups of children who were playing badminton, football, or jumping in and out of the waves, shrieking. They always accepted him, these other children, as if he naturally belonged with them, and in no time he would be taking over, issuing orders, improving the rules of the game.

The children gave him their names and addresses when they
left, but he couldn’t possibly have written to them all. He wouldn’t have had time. When he was older, they started to invite him to stay with them. His father would check out the address first, enquiring about the father’s occupation before he agreed. Lawyers, doctors and accountants were encouraged; teachers, nurses and policemen were acceptable; everyone else was unsuitable.

‘Don’t want you mixing with the wrong sort,’ he would say.

By the time he was twelve, Andy was never at home in the summer. His life was one long round of visits to his friends.

Pete stood on the side and watched, wondering how Andy did it, why the other children were pleased to have him in charge. Pete rarely spoke to anyone else, or joined in their games. They didn’t seem to notice him.

Just once, as he stood on the edge of a game of football, holding his red bucket full of round white shells, a shorter boy with curly hair and freckles came and stood by him. Pete didn’t know he was there at first. When he noticed him, he glanced quickly away and waited for him to move, but he didn’t. Only after a long time did Pete look round at him again, his head barely moving, hoping he wouldn’t be noticed.

But the boy caught his eye. ‘Stupid football,’ he said.

Pete was shocked. He waited for something to happen, for the boy to explode into flames or to sink into the sand. Football was sacred in Pete’s family. They had to worship Aston Villa, bow down to the players, spend fifty per cent of their free time discussing it. Not even his mother would dare to call football stupid.

Nothing happened.

‘I’m Brian,’ said the boy. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Peter,’ he said.

‘What shall we do, then, Peter?’

He liked the way he was accepted as Peter and not shortened to Pete. He felt less babyish, more an individual.

He’s never forgotten that holiday. Sometimes he can go
through every conversation he had with Brian. Word by word, he’s kept it all. Maybe what he remembers isn’t right, stored in a faulty filing cabinet, but it still comforts him, even now. Pete was eight and Brian was nine. His family were camping. One day, when it was cold and drizzly, Brian’s mum asked Pete’s mum if he could spend the day with them.

‘Oh, yes,’ said his mum, and it seemed to Pete that a small light of pleasure glowed in her normally clouded grey eyes, her hollow cheeks flushing a little. Then she looked nervously at Dad.

Pete’s dad hesitated, looking at Brian, eyeing his mum. Pete held his breath. They must be poor, he thought, because they’re camping and not in a hotel, and he knew his dad wouldn’t think much of that. But, for some reason, he was less aggressive on that day. He shrugged. ‘He can go if he wants to,’ he said, and went back to Hercule Poirot, sprawling across the sofa in the hotel lounge, his great hairy arms coarse and flabby against the pale pink brocade of the furniture.

They had two tents. A big one for Brian’s mum and dad and a little one for Brian. The boys played in Brian’s tent all day: spies; plotting Andy’s downfall; the Incredible Hulk, changing shape as their shadows swelled on the sides of the tent. It was too small to stand up, so they crawled everywhere. Straker remembers the sound of the wind flapping the canvas, the light rain pattering across it, the musty smell. They had tomato sandwiches for lunch and fish and chips out of newspaper for tea. It was a great day.

Then Pete went back to his family and the hotel, which was quiet and disapproving. He knew his father didn’t think much of tents, that he considered it important to be respectable, to look smart and imitate the other people in the hotel. Pete couldn’t understand why his father wanted to behave like them, trying to eat the same meals or drink the same wine. He wouldn’t even order until he’d heard someone’s request at the
next table. Sometimes they had to wait ages while he pretended to read the menu, waiting for a lead from another guest.

Andy didn’t speak to Pete again until they went home. But it was the best holiday Pete had ever had. He met Brian every day on the beach and they did all the activities that he had observed Andy doing with other children. Swimming, running, exploring rock pools, catching crabs in their nets. He can still smell the tent today. It catches him unawares every now and again, and it shocks him. It’s as if it all happened yesterday, while more recent events have gone straight out of the back door of his mind.

Felicity is talking to Sangita. She is oddly articulate. ‘We’re the same really, aren’t we? On our own, never getting married. We can be young for ever.’

Sangita: ‘I wouldn’t have married anyway.’

Felicity hesitates. ‘No, nor me. There was a man once, Eddie, but he was much older than me. I didn’t like him much. My aunt Lucy said I should of married him while I had the chance, because he was worth a fortune, but he wasn’t nice. He couldn’t stop touching me. My mum said he wasn’t right for me.’

‘I was only sixteen.’

‘I was only eighteen.’

There is a pause. Sangita isn’t good at conversation
.

Felicity starts again: ‘I might of got married later, I suppose. Once I’d given up my modelling. But I’d’ve been rich then. Wouldn’t need to marry for money. Wouldn’t need to marry at all, but if I met someone kind and nice, who loved me…you know, a boy-next-door sort of person.’

‘I was already in love.’

‘Who with?’

‘Just someone.’

More silence
.

‘Do you remember apple crumble?’ says Felicity. ‘For school dinners. With custard.’

‘I sometimes miss the peacocks,’ says Sangita
.

‘Peacocks?’

‘They were in the back garden. Six of them. My dad loved them. I think the neighbours would have come over the wall and strangled them if we went away for a holiday. They were so noisy.’

‘Did they have those pretty feathers?’

‘Oh, yes, the male ones. I always carried one with me to give to him—Rob Willow. When my parents came up after the crash, they’d been away for several days. I keep worrying that someone probably got the peacocks.’

A pause
.

Felicity: ‘We’re lucky, really. We’ll always be young and beautiful. Anyone who looks at my photos will see me at my best.’

Sangita doesn’t reply
.

‘Frozen in time, that’s us. No wrinkles, no fat, no arthritis. My mum would’ve been pleased.’

Maggie says nothing
.

When the first flushed light comes up over the sea, pushing its way round the curve of the earth and arriving ahead of the sun, Straker wakes to find himself still sitting at the table, his legs and back aching. He stands up and stretches out his arms, yawning loudly, feeling cramped and exhausted. His mind echoes with the voices of Sangita and Felicity. They’re still in his mind, inexperienced, unformed, talking about nothing.

Suleiman comes down the steps from the light room, padding lightly, his tail rigidly upright. Straker opens a tin of Rabbit and Game, and Magnificent appears from nowhere, apparently summoned home from his adventures on the head
land by the smell on the wind. They like rabbit. It tells them that there is another life, away from the sea, where not all food tastes of salt.

Suleiman looks at Magnificent’s food and thinks it’s better than his, so he moves over. Magnificent doubles round behind him and they change bowls. Straker turns on the kettle, picks up two doughnuts and goes upstairs to the light room.

This is the best time of day. The sun is rising into a high blue dome of empty sky. The sea is less turbulent beneath this emptiness, and the world seems to pause. Straker nearly always wakes just before dawn and goes upstairs for this period of nothingness. Yesterday is forgotten, today has not yet started. He feels a newness, a freshness, as if he can start again and the past has never happened. This feeling usually lasts for five minutes before the seventy-eight come racing back into his mind, tumbling over each other in their desire to be noticed.

He can see two container ships on the horizon, silent and stationary, waiting. They frequently wait there, sometimes for several days, but he doesn’t know why. They won’t be able to see him—the lighthouse must be little more than a tiny grey speck in the distance. He imagines them out there, rolling in the waves, a handful of people in a great mausoleum of a boat, and wonders what they’re doing. Eating, sleeping, playing cards? Do they take their wives along? Do they watch the sea like him and see the patterns of the waves, and take their thoughts from the sea, or do they ignore it all and pretend they’re at home, living the same dull routine that they always do? Do they feel invisible or important, taking whatever it is they take from one side of the world to another? Does normal life go on without them? Would anyone notice if they never touched land again?